Soft synths with great modulation options often get compared to modularanalog gear: “It’s got tons of LFOs! Moreenvelopes than you can shake a stick at!”But have you ever actually played a realmodular synth? Have you experienced truevoltage control with patch cables and nodigital parameter encoding? Once youhave, you get spoiled. If you haven’t, it’sprobably because modulars can be esotericand expensive: You need multiplemodules to make familiar synth sounds, forone thing. So when Doepfer announcedthe Dark Energy — a self-contained babymodular, with real patch cables, voltagecontrol, USB, and MIDI — we thought itjust might be the box that finally bringsmodular synthesis to the rest of the keyboard-playing world. In fact, it exceededthose expectations.

VOICE STRUCTURE

The Dark Energy’s architecture is deceptivelysimple: A single VCO feeds a24dB-per-octave lowpass filter, which inturn feeds a simple but clean VCA.Throw in one envelope and two LFOs,and to the casual observer, this seemslike a very basic box. Noth...

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